Actor Brendan Fraser may be poised to earn his first-ever Oscar nomination this year for “The Whale,” but he’s also mourning an upcoming project that won’t be seeing the light of day: “Batgirl.” The “Mummy” actor played Ted Carson aka Firefly, the villain of the DC film, and is just as dismayed by its cancellation as fans are.
“It’s tragic,” Fraser told Variety. “It doesn’t engender trust among filmmakers and the studio. Leslie Grace was fantastic. She’s a dynamo, just a spot-on performer. Everything that we shot was real and exciting and just the antithesis of doing a straightforward digital all green screen thing. They ran firetrucks around downtown Glasgow at 3 in the morning and they had flamethrowers. It was a big-budget movie, but one that was just stripped down to the essentials.”
“Batgirl” was developed by the prior regime at Warner Bros. and was intended to be released on HBO Max, and it did not have the heft or the budget of other theatrical DC titles, even though the production budget had ballooned to a reported $90 million. While filming had been completed, once David Zaslav took over the new company Warner Bros. Discovery, he decided to scrap and shelve the “Batgirl” movie forever.
Why “Batgirl” was cancelled depends on who you ask. The leaders of the studio determined ultimately, in spite of reshoots and increased budget, that the movie simply did not work, according to insiders. But not releasing “Batgirl” also gives Warner Bros. Discovery a tax benefit as the newly formed company looks to eliminate debt.
As of now, the film is dead and Warner Bros. Discovery has no plans to release it (if they do, those tax benefits go away), despite pleas from the film’s star.
